Stockholm Syndrome
by majorkimblee
Summary: It had been 731 days 12 hours and 15 minutes since Marco had last seen Jean. On August 27th, 2010 Jean went missing. It wasn't until 731 days 19 hours and 23 minutes after his last moment with him, that Marco learned that Jean was alive. Jean had been kidnapped. And Jean had been found. Only, what Marco didn't know is that Jean didn't want to leave his captor. Jean wanted to stay.


3:34 in the morning was not what you would consider a reasonable hour to be painting your bedroom walls, but I would say that it's actually quite a calming experience.

It was the second time in the past two years that I had decided that it was time for a change. That grey was no longer the color I thought it was seven months ago. Or if it was really even a color at all…

I remember thinking that grey would match pretty much anything and that it would cover up the old sunshine yellow walls nicely. (What was I thinking when I picked up a can the color of dog piss and decide to actually smear it all over my walls all those years ago.) I felt like grey worked at the time. It was unemotional, detached, and just downright impartial to the world moving on around it. And that right there pretty much summed up the last year, for my walls and for me.

I was unemotional, detached, and, well for lack of a better vocabulary, didn't get two shits about anything.

But this year would be different. It was time I finally at least tried to bring myself into a brighter world. Into a world where I at least cared a little. A world that maybe had just _a little bit_ of sunshine yellow.

This time I was going with something even more simple than grey. Something that wasn't in your face, something that was just there, something that I wouldn't notice that much if I dropped it on my cream colored carpets. Something white.

White. Yea, I know. It's pretty boring. Not as boring as grey maybe, but still boring. But I just remember reading somewhere that white can encourage us to clear away clutter and obstacles and that it enables fresh beginnings. And that's exactly what I needed to make this year. A fresh beginning. (I also remember reading it was the color of mourning in, like, four different cultures and several different time periods, but hey. This is me mourning the old me of the last year, _not_ anything, or anyone, else.)

I sat on the floor of my room, tongue between my teeth, eyebrows furrowed as I tried to immaculately paint near the bottom of the trim, trying not to get any paint on the carpet. Yea, I said I chose a color that I wouldn't freak out about if it landed on the floor, but does that mean I want it there? No. Otherwise I would just paint the carpet, which probably wouldn't go over well.

I tried, I really did, but my focus was elsewhere. Every now and then I would glance over to the clock sitting up on my nightstand. 3:35am.

731 days, 12 hours, and 16 minutes.

No, stop it, Marco. You told yourself you were going to stop this starting this year. You're going to make yourself go crazy. Well, crazier. We passed crazy back when you decided to frantically go to the nearest appliance and home goods store at 9:57 at night just so you could buy grey paint to paint over the yellow walls that were making you sick. And the fact that you even know it was at 9:57 at night says enough. I need to stop with the time thing.

But how could I? How could I stop noticing the minutes, days, _years_, yes plural years now, that have passed since I last saw his face. Since I last saw those golden eyes, that ashy hair, that grumpy smile. My stomach churned.

I had to notice the time, it was my countdown, well more like count up, but it was what gave me hope. It's what I did so I could hopefully one day say, "I haven't seen you in said amount of days, hours, and minutes." And then hold him close and kiss him.

That's what I was counting for. And today's count marked the two year anniversary since I last saw him. Since he went…

"Marco, are you still up?"

Great.

The door to my room pushed open slowly, and my mom peaked her head around. The deep, dark circles under her eyes and the way they were only half there told me that she couldn't sleep. Not for the same reason I wasn't in bed, but not sleeping nonetheless.

"Marco, it's going on four in the morning. You have work tomorrow." She whispered.

"So do you…" I mumbled, hoping that she wouldn't hear the annoyance in my voice.

She just started at me with her arms crossed in the doorway. Her pale nightshirt was hanging loose on her body and she just kept her eyes locked deep on my face. She knew. And I was hoping she wouldn't say anything. I was hoping that she would just give me the decency to mope around in my half grey half white room all by myself and -

"It's the anniversary." Her voice even quieter than it was before.

I didn't respond. My mind was elsewhere. My hand was moving the paint brush back and forth against the trim, but I wasn't painting anything. This happened to me every once in a while. My world would stop, time would freeze. It seemed like 731 days, 12 hours, and 16 minutes would last forever.

I thought of his hands. How his palms were rough and how they felt like sandpaper against my fingertips. How his fingers were so soft and how the backside of his hand would drip down my cheeks. How I just couldn't stop imagining what happened to those hands. What happened to his face, his arms, his back, oh god his back. He always had the most beautiful back. The way his spine ran deep into pale skin and how - Stop.

I was brought back into reality by the sound of my door closing abruptly. My mother was no longer standing where she stood just moments ago. I looked up at the clock.

731 days, 12 hours, and 19 minutes.

She stood there for three minutes while I moved a paintbrush back in forth in silence. Three minutes I spent in a better place. Somewhere I hoped he was now.

Not a better place as in, well, you know. But a better place somewhere on this Earth. Somewhere where I could find him soon. Even though, that's not what a lot of people think, but it's what I chose to believe. It's more of what gives me hope.

A lot of people think he's gone. Forever. The theories drifted in the air all senior year. The most common being that he was killed. That whether it was on purpose, or on accident, someone killed him, hid the body deep in the some lake, and left it there to rot out. Just the thought made my skin turn whiter than the walls.

Then there was the lot who believe he ran away. Everyone knew he was a grumpy kid, not as happy as he could have been in his life, but his bad attitude and constant need to rebel led him to say 'screw it all', take what money he had saved, bought a plane ticket, and started a new life in some tropical paradise. Although, I knew that couldn't be, since he hated warm weather, but that didn't rule out that he could have flown off to Russia or something.

Then there were the ridiculous theories that people just threw around as if the situation was just some kind of joke.

"He was abducted by aliens!"

"No, he obviously was an alien himself and just had to return back to the motherplanet."

"You guys are all so stupid, he secretly was a wizard and just apparated back to Hogwarts."

"How about we not make up stupid theories and actually focus on finding him?"

That last one was me.

I was asked all the time, but I have no theory. I've thought about them all, maybe not the wizard one, but the alien thing did cross my mind. I was desperate for an answer. But then I realized at 154 days, 2 hours, and 12 minutes, I wasn't going to get one. Don't ask how I remember that.

Search parties looked for weeks, his family looked for months, I've been looking for 731 days, 12 hours and… I think you get the point.

As much as I hated to admit it, my mom was right. I needed to get some sleep if I wanted to at least try to look alive at work tomorrow.

I packed up the painting supplies and threw them into the empty corner of my room. I didn't even bother to pick up the covers of my bed. I fell down flat on top and wrapped my arms around the pillow, burying my face deep into the soft fabric.

By 731 days, 13 hours, and 2 minutes I was asleep and my pillow looked like it had been left out in the rain.

The August heat pushed up against the corners of my small midwestern hometown that morning. It was obvious that summer was just trying to get a couple more good breaths in before finally giving up and letting fall take over for awhile.

I stood against the back alley wall of good ol' "Zoe's" restaurant and just let the sun burn more freckles into my skin. I didn't want my break to end. I just wanted to stand out here for an eternity and hope the sun would melt me down. I wanted to be nothing more than a sticky pile of goop roasting on the pavement. I assumed that piles of goop didn't have to feel anything other than the shoes of the unfortunate people who stepped on them. It was weird. I've had a lot of feelings the past two years and getting stepped on by dirty shoes wasn't one of them until today.

I could use a good foot to the face.

I didn't always wish for pain. There was a long time where I didn't feel anything. Where I didn't get out of bed. Didn't eat. Didn't sleep (even though I still don't do much of that). Didn't go to school. Didn't do _anything_. The only doing I was doing was sitting up in bed and just staring into grey walls that for some reason, looked an awful lot like me.

When I first heard the news that he had gone missing, I felt sick. For the first couple months that's all I felt. My stomach was at a constant state of uneasiness. I was anxious and ill and sad and always moving. I couldn't stop moving for the first couple months. I wasn't able to stand still, even for a minute. And that's no exaggeration. Trust me, I know time.

I would pace back and forth when I was supposed to be standing still and would tap my feet whenever I would sit down. I was fidgety and vulnerable and jumped at the slightest touch. I was on the move. When the first search parties were sent out in early September, I went along with them. I searched even when they weren't. Even when the skies would turn from a soft orange to inky black. I was there. Looking, but never finding.

Then when the search parties stopped and his parents seemed to be giving up, giving up on their only child, the love of their life, that's when I started losing hope. Those were the days where I felt nothing. I felt like crawling under a rock, digging myself a grave and then just sitting in it, jumping off a cliff and hoping the falling feeling would never end. I couldn't think straight and that's when things got really bad. When I couldn't go to sleep because the clock kept ticking. Because time was passing and he wasn't there next to me. He wasn't anywhere near me, as far as I knew.

And now here I was, two years later, with what seemed like an neverending rollercoaster of feelings and the only thing I wanted to feel like was a sticky, slimy puddle. I was definitely falling off that cliff, but I didn't keep falling, I feel straight into the deep end of crazy.

I pushed myself off the wall, the back of my shirt sticking to the sweat on my back. I didn't even bother to tug at my shirt to air it out. This was me thinking it was my first step in becoming a puddle.

I sulked back to the small restaurant and was nearly knocked out by the metal door that came straight for my face. I quickly stepped back.

Holding the handle on the other side was an out of breath looking Sasha. Standing there with her ponytail looking messier than ever and her chest rising up and down. The black apron around her waist looked like it was about to fall down at any moment and she quickly pulled at the strings to tighten it. Her movements all over the place.

"What's up, Sash?" I tried to sound like I cared why she was looking the way she did in front of me. But it was hard since I just assumed it was going to be for some ridiculous reason, like Connie tried to fit a whole potato in her mouth. Or Hanji was talking about "letting someone go" again and Sasha immediately, always, assumes it's her.

But what came out of her mouth next was something that made my heart stop.

"It's him. It's Jean." Her voice was wheezy.

I just stared at her. I didn't know what she meant or what she had seen, or heard, but I couldn't find the voice in me to ask. I didn't know if I wanted to know. My first thought was that he was in the restaurant. Just came in and sat down for a cup of coffee and some small talk with the waitress, but I knew that couldn't be it. If Jean was in town he wouldn't just meander around like everything was normal. My next thought was that she must have heard something. But not just anything, like his name in a conversation, or in a memory from high school, but she heard news. News about him.

"T-the news… You, you have to come look…" She could hardly speak.

I don't even remember what I thought at that moment, I don't think I thought anything at all. I just pushed Sasha out of the way and walked into the noisy kitchen. Everyone else seemed to be going about their business normally, so whatever news it was Sasha thought to come and tell me first. I couldn't feel my legs. They walked on their own. Quickly into the dining area. I turned the corner so fast I nearly ran into Connie on my way over to the small TV that sat propped up onto the wall in the corner of the restaurant.

I didn't even notice when I blocked an older woman from viewing what was on the screen, even when she snapped at me to move. I blocked her out completely. I blocked out everything except for the bold headline on the TV.

**LOCAL BOY FOUND AFTER TWO YEARS IN KIDNAPPERS HOME**

It took me awhile to process what it said because my only focus was on the image on the screen. It was a smaller looking white house that sat only streets over from where I lived. I knew it. I knew that house so well. I walked past that house every single day on my way to work, school, the store. That house sat in the middle of my commute to almost everywhere. Jean was there. He had been there all along. He was right under my nose this hold time and I wasn't even able to sniff him out. How? How could I have not known? But also, how could I have known?

So many questions, so many thoughts, were running through my mind. How did this happen? Who would do this? Why would they do this? What did they do to him? How did they find him? Did he escape? What if he's looking for his family? Or me? What do I do? Do I leave here, from work, and go try to see him? But there will surely be cop cars all over the area. Not to mention the press will be everywhere. I already had to deal with them once before, when he initially went missing, and I really don't know if I could deal with them again.

But then it hit me. I took a deep breath. And relaxed just a little. Relaxed more than I had in 731 days, 19 hours, and how many minutes? I didn't know. I didn't know! I stopped counting. I stopped counting and that meant that he was alive. He was alive and I could see him again. I could hold him and touch him and love him all over again. I needed to see him.

My head snapped over to where my boss stood. I had to get out of here. I needed to be with him.

"Hanji." I walked up to her as she was carrying a tray out from the kitchen.

"I'm sorry, Marco, can't you see I'm a little busy." She sat down the tray next to the table with the old woman who was snappy with me earlier. "Alright now who had the Sunrise Sampler."

"Hanji, I need to leave." I whispered to her as she sat down the plate breakfast food down. "I need to get out of here, it's Jean."

She turned to me, curiosity and shock sitting in her eyes. "What do you mean?"

I just pointed to the TV. She squinted and looked up at the screen. Her eyes following the words that ran under the headline. The curiosity soon faded and the shock was all that was left. She looked at me and didn't have anything to say. She knew what my relationship was with Jean, hell most people knew at this point. She simply nodded and that was my okay to get the hell out of there. I silently thanked her.

I nearly ripped my bike out of the lock once I was outside and pedaling towards the street that was all too familiar to me. I knew it would take me exactly seven minutes to bike there at normal speed, but I was not going close to normal speed. Call me the next Lance Armstrong because I could win the Tour de France easily at this speed. And the only steroid I was one was pure emotional longing to see his face. Him. He was what was pushing me to get there as soon as possible.

I rounded the corner onto the next street, closer to where the house was located, and could already see the news vans. There had to be at least seven of them parked along the side of the road, and two more parked up on driveways where street space ran out. People were spilling out of their houses into the street and walking over to the white house that sat on the corner. There were cop cars everywhere. In the middle of lawns, speckled along the street, sitting right in front of the tired white house.

I threw my bike on the sidewalk as I ran up as close as I could get to the house. The street on which it faced was blocked off and tons of people already stood right at the orange barricades. I made my way through the crowd, up to the front of the action. I looked around at the street that stretched ahead of me.

Cop cars coming and going from the other side, and cops, medics, investigators all walked around outside of the house. Many of them entering and exiting at a time, all looking immersed in their jobs.

"When will you be bring the boy out?" A blonde reporter standing next to me asked one of the cops. She had her pen and pad in hand, ready to record every bit of the action that went down. She was nearly choking on her excitement. All for a story. Sickening.

"Ma'm we're going to be bringing him out here shortly, but we ask that you all keep quiet when he does. Don't ask questions, please." The cop stated.

"Oh of course, officer." She gave him a scheming grin, scribbling something down on her notepad.

At that point I couldn't resist. I got the cops attention and asked him the only question that was on my mind.

"Is he okay?" My heart was in my throat again.

I just knew by the way he hesitated it wasn't good. He took a deep breath and shook his head, stuck his hands on his waist and just said, "He'll live, kid. That's all that matters."

I couldn't breath. From that point on my eyes just stayed focused on the open door of the house.

I never really looked much at that house before. It was just like any other house before today. You never thought anything of it. It was just another home that I assumed was probably lived in by some average suburban family who liked to fix up old houses and put modern art in the stairway.

It wasn't until today that I took it all in. It was a two story with a large porch out front. The house use to be a bit run down, until a new family moved in a couple years ago. They painted the rickety old thing a bright white. A white so white that on summer days like these you felt like you didn't want to take off your sunglasses looking at it. It sat there, a little white house in the middle of suburbia getting burned by the heat. I had the sudden urge to run home and throw out all the white paint cans I still had cluttered around my room.

Looks like I would be making another trip to the home goods store. What was I thinking with white?

"Sir, you ready?" Another cop yelled out from the porch.

The cop I had been talking to looked up at him and gave him a simple nod.

The whole crowd took in a breath. The muttering stopped, the reporter next to me was nearly falling out of her heels. Everyone was waiting for what they knew was about to come. I bit the inside of my cheeks. I couldn't breath. I could feel my vision going blurry, my head was about to explode. How would he look? Would he be so skinny he could barely walk? Was he tortured like so many others who had been kidnapped before him? I saw the stories on the news. I knew what happened. And now this was his story. This was real. This was what had happened. I couldn't even blink.

Then, out of the doorway, came three figures. Two cops stood on either side of him. Holding a blanket up in front of his face, to protect him from the media, I thought. The crowd was still holding their breath.

He walked slowly down the steps and as soon as his feet hit the sidewalk it was an eruption of voices. Reporters, neighbors, passersby were all yelling at him, asking him questions, wanting to know what happened. They were nearly foaming out the mouth to get some idea of what went on inside that house. Their voices were all drowned out when I caught a glimpse of his face as he walked to the nearest cop car.

He looked thinner, but not extremely so. He was wearing a black hoodie, that was definitely not his, on top of grey sweat pants, that I also realized weren't his. My eyes trailed down to his feet where I noticed the familiar converse sneakers. Familiar. It really was him.

"Jean…" I murmured. And then all at once, it hit me.

The tears began falling down my face, and I was smiling. I was actually smiling. I was smiling for the first time since that last moment I saw him exactly two years ago. I screamed his name. I let it escape my lips. It felt the same way it had back then. Jean. Jean. _Jean_. It was really him. His hair, his eyes, his everything. "Jean!" I couldn't stop. I don't know if I was actually trying to get his attention or was just so happy that I could finally taste his name on my lips again.

If I was trying to get his attention it worked. His eyes locked onto mine for only a second, but the look on his face it was so, so -

disgusted?

At me?

My smile faded as he scowled. His eyes were fierce, piercing my entire being as I stood, shocked, behind the barricade. Then he spoke. His voice was angry, concerned. "Where's Eren?! Is he okay? I need him!" He screamed at the cop. "What have you all done with him?"

Remember that puddle I was talking about earlier? Yea. It's safe to say that there and then I would have been completely content with drowning in myself on that hot summer tar beneath my feet. Jean acted like didn't want me. He didn't want to look at me. He didn't want to be with me. He wanted to be with someone named Eren. Not me. Eren.

"That sicko is gonna be locked behind bars for a long ass time, kid." One of the cops said as he pushed Jean into the car. "That's what he gets. And it's what he deserves."

The last thing I heard before the car door shut was Jean screaming no. Jean was screaming. Because his kidnapper was going to jail. His kidnapper. Jail. No. Jean. Screaming. Kidnapper. What.

He wanted to stay with his kidnapper. He wanted him to be okay.

I looked over to the reporter standing next to me, laughing to herself. "Oh, man." she chuckled. "This is going to be my best story yet."


End file.
